Not once did the article talk about the C++ ABI which is one of the most important things a library developer needs to be aware of (as opposed to an application

Not once did the article talk about the C++ ABI which is one of the most important things a library developer needs to be aware of (as opposed to an application developer). The C++ ABI is unstable. You can't effectively deploy 3rd party libraries with that either. Android ships with multiple versions of the compiler, each one of those are incompatible with each other's standard library. On top of that, Android ships multiple C++ standard libraries for each compiler, all of which are not-interoperable either. Then Android updates the compiler with each NDK drop introducing more potential incompatibilities. The end result is you can't deploy prebuilt C++ libraries (a prickly issue for commercial/proprietary code) unless you can force users to use your exact toolchain. But library writers usually can't fairly dictate those terms, especially if the users want intermix libraries from other sources which may use a different toolchain.